Civilization III, IV and CivCity: Rome now on GOG

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Three of the best entries in Sid Meier’s classic Civilization series are available now on GOG. Right now you can get Civilization III: Complete, Civilization IV: The Complete Edition, and CivCity: Rome DRM-free from the GOG website or GOG Galaxy client. And with the weekend upon us, what’s better than curling up with games that grip you tightly and just won’t let you go?

In Civilization III and IV, you take control of a nation and chart its destiny across the planet. These two titles, especially Civilization IV, strike a great balance between complexity and accessibility. If you’re a fan of 4X strategy and somehow have never bought these two games, make the purchase now. No hesitation, just buy.

CivCity: Rome switches things up in that you only control the city of Rome. It’s a bit less complicated than the main Civilization games and has a mission-based game design. CivCity: Rome isn’t as critically acclaimed as Civ III or IV, but if you’re a fan of SimCity it’s similar in idea. Note also that it doesn’t have the Sid Meier name attached, and was only co-developed by Firaxis.

You’re only four days late on mentioning this. =P Anyway, it’s been about a decade since my last brush with the Civ series, so I’m a bit out of practice. Grabbed both of them and I’ve been playing a couple of games each to compare each version.

I know Civ IV tends to be revered by many, but, frankly, gameplay-wise I’ve actually found part III to be more fun so far. Sure IV’s UI is a bit cleaner and it makes it a bit quicker to understand, but it seems to be suffering a bit from feature creep. *shrug* I guess it doesn’t hurt that I still kind of dig III’s 2D isometric presentation as well.

Initially, I enjoyed CC:R a lot. But the further you advanced, the more clear it became that the game mechanics had a serious problem:

It has the usual Caesar-style “upgrade the level of residential areas by providing them with more and more luxury”-mechanism. But the distribution of said luxuries over the city did not work properly. My craftsmen would produce certain luxuries just a few streets away, but they would start to pile up, and never reach the houses that needed them. This was because people actually had to go out and pick up their luxuries themselves, if I remember correctly.

As a result, after the city has reached a certain size, it becomes necessary to tear large parts of it down and reorganize them so that all craftsmen are close to all houses, otherwise the goods transportation simply collapses. This was even sillier as the game allowed for donkey carts for good transportation, but these could only be used for external trade, not for intra-city “home delivery” of luxuries.

Of course, if you know ahead of time, then you can make a master plan, leave empty lots in the right places for later use, etc. I did that too to a certain degree of course. I am not saying it was impossible to play this game.

But nonetheless, if enough goods are being produced, and the game provides no effective way to bring them to where they are needed, that is bad design. And I did not find it enjoyable that playing this game mainly devolves into fighting against that bad design in its later stages.